I am having issues getting my fuel gauge to work and have a question about the sender. Should I be getting continuity across the ground and sending posts of the sender? I assume no but I am so I wanted to double check as I trouble shoot this. It's a VDO sender. I think I may be missing some sort of gasket between the L shaped bracket and the top of the sender.
Do you mean from ground and the wire that goes to the gauge? If so, as you change the position of the arm, the resistance should change as well.
Sorry I might not have explained it well. I am wondering if I should have continuity between these two posts on the sender. I do and I don't think I should.
Tell us how you are checking for continuity. If you are using anything other than ah Ohm Meter, you will not get useful information. As he said you should be seeing resistance, that changes as you move the float. It appears you might have the wire from the resistance unit disconnected from the sender post...if that is true, then you should have infinite resistance (no continuity) between the two posts.
Using a meter . In the picture it wasn't connected as I was in the process of disassembling it to check if I had a short somewhere. I seem to be getting continuity through out the sweep of the sender on the bottom so I must have a short at the top somewhere. I just wanted to confirm that it worked as I thought it should. So it should go from zero to something which it isn't at the moment. Thanks for everyone's advise.
There should be continuity but you need to use an ohm meter to check the sender. Check the model number of the sender in the VDO catalog to get the ohm rating if you don't know it and then move the float though it's cycle and watch the meter. Also make sure that the sender matches the gauge. All fuel gages and senders are not created equal even in the same brand.
VDO gauges use 10 to 180 ohm resistance, so you should never see zero ohms (unless you have the ohmmeter range set wrong, then you'll see something that looks like zero all the time) make sure the meter is set to read Ohms, not KOhms, or MOhms. If it has a scale with 200 Ohms as the upper range, that would be best for this test
The bolt that holds the L bracket on should have a OL or infinite reading between the L bracket and the bolt. L bracket itself needs to be grounded so the float reads the different levels.
I figured out what the issue was as soon as I put it back together as I did exactly the same thing as what I assume the problem was originally when reassembling. The lead terminal had spun when it was tightened up and was touching the vertical bar holding the sending unit. I didn't notice it when I took it out but as soon as I started tightening it up it spun and hit so it was pretty obvious. As soon as I made sure it wasn't touching it seems to be working as intended. Now I can see if that was the problem or if I moved it removing the unit and something else is wrong. Thanks for your help guys.
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